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Seems like its been so long since relevant technical submissions were made to/. I remember being able to learn so many interesting OS tricks from poster's comments to articles and hearing about new software.

Years ago, a kernel regression that didn't result in a lockup or massive data corruption would have been borderline slow-news-day material. Today, software quality as a whole has increased, and there's not as much of that (or as many groundbreaking new features) going on. There's still some interesting stuff going on in the mobile world, but PCs and Servers have largely been figured out for the time being. At least compared to what it was a while back.

As much as I'd like to jump on this "Blame slashdot, slashdot sucks now" bandwagon, they're just reporting what's happening, IMHO.

And if they aren't reporting what you think is newsworthy, blame yourself for not submitting 'real' stories and/or not drinking from the firehose.

Well, that's marginally better than the copyright wars that reigned here not so long ago... or the global warming debate... or... what was before that? I forget.

I imagine, however, that those generated more revenue. Patent battles among corporations are pretty much a battle among giants, and most of us here are just nerdly peons, fairly removed from such. They're gonna do whatever they want, work it out in the end, and the rest of us will get shat upon, one way or another.

From here in the "cheap seats"? Shit is shit, regardless of who is dumping it on you, or so it seems to me.

Well, that's marginally better than the copyright wars that reigned here not so long ago... or the global warming debate... or... what was before that? I forget.

Religion, specifically Intelligent Design. Which typically degenerated into a poo-flinging contest even faster than those two since neither side knew neither theology nor science (or at least the people who made the most noise didn't).

My theory is that these topics get posted cyclically to keep people from getting bored. It's not unlike crop rotati

The wildest prediction would not submerge Denmark... for instance, I am about 50m above the surface of the sea.

The capital Copenhagen, now, would be possible, at the central parts. But as we are set for a few-metres-rise-by-2100, even most of Copenhagen will be above-sea-level. At worst, it could be a new Venedi with bad weather and international cuisine.

It's a problem with the BIOS manufacturers, and the BIOS incorrectly reporting its ASPM capability. When an OEM installs Windows on a laptop, it can correctly tune these settings. But for a fresh install of Linux that YOU performed, a database of every motherboard + BIOS combination needs to be maintained in the open to set the force PCIE ASPM flag. If set wrongly, when the BIOS doesn't support it, it could lead to locking which is far more serious.

There are other solutions to effectively manage power in Linux, like Jupiter [jupiterapplet.org].

And this sort of thing really ought to be used to slap MS upside the head for behaving irresponsibly. Years back when ACPI was first coming out and a significant number of motherboard models were shipped with a broken DSDT that would only function with Windows. The company creating the firmware didn't care and MS had the money to work around the problem leaving Windows the only platform that would work correctly.

MS could have solved the problem by refusing to implement work arounds, but opted to go out of

And this sort of thing really ought to be used to slap MS upside the head for behaving irresponsibly.

Wow, I knew someone would find a way to blame Microsoft for this... but so early in the thread - well done! Hey, there's a little girl missing in the Los Angeles area - could you find a way to blame Microsoft for her disappearance as well?

It's like the "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" game, but for Linux fanboys!

That was a series of leaked emails from 1999-ish where Microsoft had discussed that hardware was "too standard" so actually encouraged this as a way for OEMs that sell finished systems to look better... And to spike the budding Open Source as well.

Intel happily chipped in because the pushed specs like USB where every device can be super cheap... And controlled by the CPU... all those $39 printers, winmodems, GMA900, etc all sucked up CPU so Intel could sell more... And all tho

It's pretty well established that the ACPI implementation that MS was using with Win XP was non-standard. The one that folks had access to wouldn't compile the DSDTs that were coming with a lot of the computers because they were buggy and non-standard. MS had the advantage of controlling the only validation program that mattered and could hard code into their OS the bits necessary to work with the most common bugs.

Unfortunately for Linux, *BSD and everybody else, those coders didn't have access to that information and had to go to a huge amount of work to rewrite the DSDT and load that so that it would work as the standard specify.

seems to me that such features could be set up using a function probing tool that tested the function of each command and logged it so they system could know what does work, what does not work, and what crashes the system, submit results back to t he repository and linux will have a more complete and accurate database than windows has (include information on lower value probabilistic errors rather than just does/does not work, warn the user when yea this model is supposed to work but there is a 1/2000 chan

No, that only worked in cases where the Windows DSDT was standards compliant, much of the time even that didn't. I've done that in the past and it doesn't guarantee you any improvement as MS wasn't validating the DSDT against the official Intel implementation that everybody else had access to.

Nice, that some jackass with mod points felt the need to mod me down without bothering to understand the issue though.

Just because it's possible doesn't mean the zealots actually care about even trying. It's so much cooler to play the blame game, rather than focus on what's actually important: making things work!

The net result is that someone else has to implement the hackish-yet-perfectly-acceptable fix. Kernel devs could tackle it, but they won't, so someone else will. That someone else is often Redhat or Ubuntu, which means the fixes don't travel back upstream.

That would be like if the company that made your engine created a bug where piston 3 would miss-fire ever 8th stroke, and then YOU demanding that the ECU programmers test for the bug when you start the car and not fire the 3rd piston each 8th revolution.

The problem is that things like the ACPI are by chipset, and manufacturer, model and firmware rev. PCI vendor and ID strings aren't enough to just make a table to check at start... Let alone all the hardware interactions in an end user machine.

Even trying to look up the settings on websites that track this stuff for some random PC you didn't build yourself is an hours long daunting task... And Big Box stuff often never makes those lists.

> I used to use linux on the desktop, then when OSX came out because I didn't have to do these kinds of adjustments.I used to use linux on the desktop, then when OSX came out I switched because I didn't have to do these kinds of adjustments.

Of the two grandmas I know, one uses Linux (a relatively frequent user), one Windows (occasionally). Both because the person they're most likely to ask in case of problems use those systems as well, and both didn't set up their systems themselves.

Yeah, but is the Linux grandma one of those cases where she has been taught how to fire up the web browser, but for all other tasks this maintenance person has to hold the hand or dial in with ssh to set up things...:)

It's the same on Windows. When the DNS servers at our ISP go down it's not as if my mother just goes "Oh, I'll just pop into the control panel here and use the Google DNS server!"

In my experience, anything beyond running a basic program on any OS is something that a non-computer literate user is not going to be able to do. Windows, Mac, and Linux are all equally difficult to use.

The marginal performance improvements you get by tweaking kernel settings will not make one whit of difference to the average user unless there is a glaring performance issue like the power drain currently being discussed.

Grandma isn't going to install Linux on her laptop -- you are. And as the technically knowledgeable person, you should be doing any such tweaking. Other systems have the benefit of the OEM doing the tweaking and tuning, but it does get done by somebody. Don't blame Linux for not doing something automagically that other systems don't do, either.

"...most linux development is primarily focused on servers..."

I don't believe that's true. While server tweaks get the press, there is a lot of effort put into the desktop experience as well. You're just far more likely to hear about kernel tweaks that are useful for desktop performance from the "real time systems" people.

Well, Linux then clearly does not pass "nerd" test either. Or perhaps I am not nerd enough. Anyway I do not even know most of the "tweaking" parameters, and I could not care less. I just want it to work.

Well, Linux then clearly does not pass "nerd" test either. Or perhaps I am not nerd enough. Anyway I do not even know most of the "tweaking" parameters, and I could not care less. I just want it to work.

Fair enough.

So go get yourself a new laptop, replace the drive and install Windows.

Ah, ah, ah. No. Don't install those drivers or that update from the OEM's site! That's a tweak. We're trying to be fair here. No tweaking. Just the OS.

Ok, so now that you've got it installed, you might be wondering why power management isn't as good and why some of the hardware doesn't work the way it used to.

Now you know my frustration with Windows. I don't know most of the "tweaking" parameters, and I could not care

It's not just Grandma, but uncle and nephew as well. Being old doesn't make one ignorant, failure to want to learn does. Take it from a 59 year old Linux-using nerd who has folks in their 20s asking me to help them with their computers.

Be serious. The overwhelming majority of the install base is on the server, you can't really believe that majority of the development isn't as well. There are a number of good reasons why most development is on the server, not the least of which is that because Linux is more difficult to configure initially but is arguably easy to maintain once configured, and while 10% of the desktop installers are nerds, 100% of th

WTF? Your FUD is just plain wrong. A Linux install is easier and takes far less time than debugging her virus-ridden Windows install, especially if Windows is so screwed it requires a reinstall. The last Windows install I did was XP and it was a royal pain in the ass and VERY time consuming.

When Granny's PC will no longer boot, a Linux install will give you far more time to spend with Granny than Windows will. And once it's installed it's not likely to need any more work until you have a hardware failure.

Well, actually I mostly agree, except with the special (but unfortunately not too uncommon) case of having a laptop with a poorly supported WLAN chipset needing a closed driver... Often leading to the all-too-common dilemma of needing Internet access to get Internet access... My above post was specifically in relation to TFA, and how it demonstrates, if you install Linux, be preparted to Google for solutions to obscure problems, or be satisfied with poor performance and bad rep for Linux.

When Vista first came out all sorts of people were noticing battery life decreased substantially.

Yeah but Linux hasn't just come out and it isn't suddenly requiring new drivers from everybody because it broke the old model. Linux is supposed to be working by now. This is the year of Linux, remember?

When Vista first came out all sorts of people were noticing battery life decreased substantially.

Yeah but Linux hasn't just come out and it isn't suddenly requiring new drivers from everybody because it broke the old model. Linux is supposed to be working by now. This is the year of Linux, remember?

Linux requires new drivers all the time. The kernel APIs/ABIs for drivers change all the time causing all sorts of breakage. Meanwhile in Windows 7 I can load Windows 2000 device drivers.

This is the kind of thing that makes linux a poor choice on the desktop. While the fix is correct from a technical perspective, it fails the "Grandma Test". If you're incredibly technical, no problem. Grandma, however, isn't going to know and understand how to enable ASPM via grub.conf. Her response is probably going to be, "Why are there worms in my computer?" A better route would be to develop a test to detect the error condition on the install of the OS, then save the configuration accordingly.

Good luck determining all the windows drivers you need to install when rebuilding a laptop from bare drive and wanting to avoid all the bloatware that the manufacturer wants to put on it. Depending on the model number you may have one chipset, or another, depending on what options you choose for the wireless devices.

I just did this two weeks ago on a Dell laptop. From start to fully functional OS, starting with a non-dell windows xp CD, including sound, network (both wireless and ethernet), and graphics drivers totaled about 2 hours. The total time is misleading as well because more than an hour of that was formatting and waiting for the installer to copy the files over.

Dell's site was easy to navigate for my old laptop (Dell D620) and had all the drivers broken down by category. It was a complete no-brainer, and I'

If your hardware is recent (as in, last few years), and you're installing Windows 7, all you need is to get Internet connectivity working. In many cases WiFi will work out of the box, otherwise you'll need wired - but once there, Windows Update can locate and install all needed drivers in vast majority of cases. I haven't had a case where I had to hunt down some driver in the last 2 years.

One of the HUGE advantages of linux (and other *nix derivatives) is the ability to seamlessly move the OS from one machine to another without having to make ANY changes. The only exception is moving from nvidia to ati video cards (or vise-versa), but the OS will still boot. These "check at install time" fixes are very dangerous to that huge feature. You guys are actually demanding a software fix to a firmware bug. Absolutely unbelievable...

I think affected users are demanding a fix for a bug. They won't much care what the fix is or where the bug is, they just want their po... email on the go.

Solution to your "move from one machine to another" thing would be to tie certain settings to certain hardware signature. If signature changes, revert settings to safe values at boot. It would be a very useful thing to have overall, until the happy day comes when there are no hardware or firmware or software bugs in the world.

One of the HUGE advantages of linux (and other *nix derivatives) is the ability to seamlessly move the OS from one machine to another without having to make ANY changes. The only exception is moving from nvidia to ati video cards (or vise-versa), but the OS will still boot. These "check at install time" fixes are very dangerous to that huge feature.

You could check it at the beginning of every boot. If the setting was correct, continue. If it wasn't, automatically change it and reboot if necessary.

They have been playing the blame game. Seriously though, I don't care whether it's an upstream issue or a downstream issue, 30% increase in power consumption is pretty big issue no matter what the reason. That's the reason why I am still on Ubuntu 10.10 and haven't upgraded. If they don't fix this before the support window runs out for 10.10 I am switching to something else (maybe even Windows). I use laptop on my battery all the time (in the bathroom, at the library, coffee shop etc.). A 30% reduction in b

Even though I have used Linux for several years now and am capable of using 'pcie_aspm=force' to get around the issue, I just don't like having to tweak to get around an issue that I expect should not be there in the first place. Tweaking to improve your desktop experience is one thing but tweaking to get around a kernel issue, Linux is too mature now to expect the user to do it.

I'm not so sure about this. I enabled the fix as proposed by Phoronix and saw a 15% battery life improvement; I'm now getting almost 5 hours, which is pretty good for this system.But 15% was not "significant" really. So "to regain much of their battery life" seems like an exaggeration in par with the alarmist tone of the articles in Phoronix. Sure, there's a problem, and I certainly appreciate Phoronix's efforts to pinpoint the cause and offer a workaround, but it's certainly not as bad as they've been maki

Phoronix has issues because the guy running it likes to oversensationalize and hyperbolize to get traffic and ad revenue... which is to say it's exactly like Slashdot with the difference being that Phoronix actually does some useful work and there are valuable facts that Phoronix discovers.

The (multiple) kernel power bugs are a very real problem affecting a large number of Linux users and Phoronix helped to shine a light on the issue and at least get the word out about work-arounds. I don't hang on everything that Phoronix publishes, but dismissing it just shows that you want to remain wilfully ignorant about real issues surrounding Linux so that you can appear 'l33t' to your friends.

Phoronix testing of video devices has been very helpful to me. The state of Intel and AMD video drivers is analysed in enough detail to make good decisions about hardware for embedded systems. I've found high correlation between my own test results and those of Phoronix.

Phoronix has issues because the guy running it likes to oversensationalize and hyperbolize to get traffic and ad revenue... which is to say it's exactly like Slashdot with the difference being that Phoronix actually does some useful work and there are valuable facts that Phoronix discovers.

The (multiple) kernel power bugs are a very real problem affecting a large number of Linux users and Phoronix helped to shine a light on the issue and at least get the word out about work-arounds. I don't hang on everything that Phoronix publishes, but dismissing it just shows that you want to remain wilfully ignorant about real issues surrounding Linux so that you can appear 'l33t' to your friends.

but dismissing it just shows that you want to remain wilfully ignorant

Or it could mean that the town folk are a bit tired of running out to see no wolf [wikipedia.org]. Phoronix may be on to something with the power issues but the signal to noise ratio is very low. Every article is stretched out to 10 pages full of full page advertisements, contains 90+ links to other Phoronix articles (as if that somehow makes each article more credible), and their forms are overrun with clueless trolls.

Honest question here. Do you know of any other, reputable, sites people can use to see which video cards work best with linux, which SSD's actually deliver on speed, etc? I've long used phronix simply because it was all I knew about, but would love to have some other sites to at least compare notes with.

for SSDs and other such OS independent stuff, i like http://www.silentpcreview.com/ [silentpcreview.com] Ony site that i have found with a load cell to test manufacturers claims on PSUs, including the efficiency ones, same goes for fans (both CFM and sound)

As for video cards, Assume that non-bleeding edge desktop cards from nvidia just work, as do intel "cards" but with poor performance. AMD/ATI cards may or may not work, and even if they do only sometimes with the right versions of the kernel, X, and catalyst.

But this is a good example of why Linux isn't ready for the masses. Sure the geeks here, with years of experience and who actually like to hang out at geek heavy sites can use esoteric workarounds, but what about Sally the cashier? Joe the construction worker? your landlady? All of these people will only find that Linux equals shit battery life if they were to use one which they would then tell to all their friends, hurting the image further.

Don't be stupid. If they had done that we would all be blasting Linux for making things unstable. The setting that used the power regression was that due to stability issues Linux now by default leaves the power state setting where the BIOS left it with a switch to enable it if you feel brave. This all means that if you have a non buggy chipset Linux will use the power save setting as before. This is the smart play because if the BIOS hasn't set it than it hasn't been tested by the manufacturer.

So your answer is use esoteric workarounds [tmrepository.com]? I'm shocked you didn't add stable kernel ABI nonsense [tmrepository.com] just to add to your giant fail and bullshit. And folks wonder why Linux is dead last. MSFT and Apple are bring their A games, your playing hackey sack.

I know its a complete shock but to most people? windows and OSX just work and they do so without fail, without esoteric workarounds, without driver bullshit and WITHOUT EXCUSES, which sadly is all you get from the "community" anymore, along with bullshit, insul

No My answer is for the BIOS makers to do the right thing and quite frankly, the current situation is hardly Microsoft's "A" game when an estimated 70% of windows problems are due to driver crashes. The only reason MicroSoft allows this to continue is because it works against their competitors and if they gave a flying crap about their own customers they would have demanded hardware makers all conform to a set of standards that MicroSoft can write drivers for a long time ago.

Riiight, it works for MSFT but it is everyone ELSE'S fault when Linux doesn't work, couldn't be bad OS design, right? you DO know what excuses and assholes have in common, yes? The USER don't give a shit WHY it don't work, and BTW in Win 7 a good 85%+ of the drivers? They JUST WORK. bring your A game or sit on the bench, your choice.

So then please be the first to join in on any "You can replace that Windows machine with Linux" posting on/. and point out IT IS A TOTAL LIE and by your VERY OWN WORDS Linux is NOT a usable replacement for Windows but for Macs instead!

You see it is THIS, this right here, kind of hypocrisy and bullshit that has made sure Linux stays right where it is, dead last. They say "Its a drop in replacement for Windows!" and when you point out articles like TFA that show if you drop in your system goes to shit? They

OSX is designed for a single hardware specification, Linux runs on countless of hardware, and we have to reverse engineer some drivers and try to make most hardware work. Your comments are clearly disrespectful, and you should go bitch the hardware manufacturers instead.

In that vein, a registry of some kind that told you what hardware was compatible with your Linux distro would be a godsend. I mean, I've seen various half-hearted attempts to start something like this, but they've always petered out. Then when you find them on Google, you get your hopes up, only to have them dashed by lists upon lists of laptops, video cards, sound cards, etc. that were EOL'd years ago.

Sorry, I started dismissing it when they sat on a fairly major bug/regression for a week [phoronix.com], and then had a big article about how bugs/regressions do not get fixed in the kernel.

If you find a bug/regression report it to LKML, don't expect the linux devs to watch the output of your little test suite. Don't get me wrong, I really like the testing, just that when they see something like this, and have it narrowed down to a few commits, freaking report it so it can get fixed.

I tried to read the writeup on the website. It launched a pop-up ad (on work PC, must accept...) and then it froze my browser. WTF? I won't let that website near any of my personal PCs if it's going to be that abuisive.

It really did, and he claims it's still in the works... I'm quite bitter as well but he seems confident in his source (no pun intended). It makes sense that it took longer than Valve intended, I just hope it didn't get cancelled.

The fact of the OSX Steam release gives me hope (if they'll do OSX, they've done most of the work, go after Linux too), but the counter-fact that nothing has been released or announced, despite most of the work being done, takes that hope away again.

Sadly it won't happen, and here is why: Both Windows and OSX support DRM, Linux don't, its just that simple. More and more of the titles on Steam have DRM on TOP of Steam, so all those titles? poof, gone. can't offer those. So already you've fractured their market. Then of course you have all the "phone home" games, and of course steam itself which is DRM, and we have seen how there is a VERY vocal group in the Linux community that thinks ALL DRM is the most evil thing ever created and thus will go out of t

I think there IS a Steam for Linux, at least inside Valve.It may be that they are still working on it with plans for a future release.It may be that its only a test and not actually intended for release. It may be that it was intended for release but was canceled for some reason.

Blizzard for example at one point had a Linux client for World of Warcraft. But the "powers that be" vetoed the release because then they would need to maintain that release and release Linux patches concurrently with Mac and Window

Ubuntu regularly ship with patched versions of stuff to fix annoyances like this from upstream. That's why I switched from Debian, who avoid patching upstream even if it means things are a bit broken. The Debian way in theory leads to better software in the long-run, which is good, but I want my machines to work now

If you want a specific example, the DHCP client Debian used doesn't have an option to send the system hostname - you had to manually enter the hostname into the configuration file. This annoyed